Liam Williams: why heckling has gone out of fashion

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Last year’s show was called Capitalism; this one might have been called Reluctant Socialism. That’s the condition Liam Williams self-diagnoses: socialist because his noisy conscience keeps getting in the way of living a selfish life, and reluctant for much the same reason. It extends the project embarked upon in that terrific 2014 show, whereby Williams battles with low self-esteem and a culture that couldn’t care less to assert and act on his horror at the status quo. It’s an exciting undertaking, even if the emphasis here – even more so than last year – is less on fomenting revolution than on Williams’s descent into moral collapse.

It’s lighter on laughs and heavier on angst, then, as Williams adds to his comedy of ideological distress with a heart-rending subplot of relationship breakdown. None of that is played for laughs as such: at earlier performances, he reportedly punched the venue’s ceiling so hard that onlookers feared for both his knuckles and his emotional equilibrium. In a recent interview, Williams implied that his standup channelled a version of his teenage self. But if it’s an act, it’s a fiercely convincing one. He looks like he’s dredging playfulness from a subterranean place, and his material is sometimes more bleak than comedy-bleak.

But then, seriousness of purpose is apropos: the last thing political comedy needs is more glibness. And at its best, Williams’s work fuses anger and humour to very effectively deconstruct how capitalism co-opts and keeps us supine. There’s a fretful set-piece dramatising why an unwashed bean tin forfeits Williams’s right to protest at climate change, and an absurd analogy proposed to the supposed truism that “the rich get richer, the poor get poorer”. The latter recalls recent Stewart Lee material in its dreamlike illogic, as does a skit in which an evil wizard comes to arbitrate on Williams’s love life, with unexpectedly ultra-violent consequences.

The show is less compelling when Williams plays the depression straight – when he tells us his life has peaked already, say, and here’s a list of dreams he’ll now never fulfil. I love that he’s added rap to his armoury: his inscrutable head-bobbing between verses here is a sight to behold. But only the first of three “sad boy raps” (with its giddy rhyming of “phoenix”, “Kleenex” and “v-necks”) registers as comedy; the later two are downbeat verging on desolate. The tension between pessimism and the puny will to resist – to laugh, if nothing else – is central to Williams’s work. The balance isn’t perfect here, but it’s another gripping hour of blackly comic performance.